


The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside Of You And Like This You Keep Them Alive

by SORD



Series: Rejoice! Our Times Are Intolerable. [2]
Category: Gintama
Genre: All kinds of good stuff, Angst, Everyone's miserable and everything is terrible and it never gets better, Friendship/Love, Joui War, Misery, Self-Loathing, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SORD/pseuds/SORD
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't start from friendship. "Friendship," as though it's something that can bloom on the battlefield. War isn't grade school, you shouldn't make friends with walking corpses, and nobody knows who's next, so why bother? </p><p>(This is the nasty other half of War Is A Purification Rite)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside Of You And Like This You Keep Them Alive

_I FORGET YOUR NAME_  
_I DON’T THINK_  
_I BURY MY HEAD_  
_I BURY YOUR HEAD  
_ _I BURY YOU_

-Jenny Holzer

**  
**

It doesn't start from friendship. "Friendship," as though it's something that can bloom on the battlefield. War isn't grade school, you shouldn't make friends with walking corpses, and nobody knows who's next, so why bother? (Tatsuma bothers, and mostly succeeds. He reaches out and grabs the world by the shirtfront, shaking it into affection as he laughs his fool head off. Gintoki and Katsura and the countless soon-dead adore him.)

Anyway, it doesn't begin in friendship. You feel sorry for the poor bastard.

You know that look, that terrible fascinated look. He stares at Gintoki like a hungry dog stares at his master's plate, desperate and adoring. You know that look and you know that feeling. You've spent years knowing that feeling while oblivious Katsura flits around, making onigiri and being inspirational.

When you recognize that look you bite your tongue and hold your peace for as long as humanly possible, but you've got two good eyes and they both can see the future. Tatsuma, loud, thrilled, frightened, drunk. He'll act on it, or he won't, but either way, he'll vanish - fling himself into the path of some devastating Amanto weapon or out to the wide world. It doesn't matter. Either way he'll leave.

Unacceptable. Tatsuma is not disposable. He has to be a leader. Katsura is the idealism and you are the anger and Gintoki is the mindless devastation but Tatsuma is the heart and the laughter and (such cynicism, when did you start thinking this way?) the money. He gets weapons and medicine and food, and when the believers die (and they will) he can purchase fresh soldiers.

(Perhaps he's laughed his way through the scar tissue surrounding your heart. What a disgusting thought. You've lost too much family already, you don't need another brother.)

So. That's how it begins: pity and urgency. You wait until after a battle when you know he'll be vulnerable and shove him against the wall. You half-command and half-beg him to stay away from Gintoki. You promise to care for him. You declare yourself his shield. In a moment of despicable weakness, you ask him to protect you. You hate yourself for admitting your need, you hate yourself for offering your hollow promise of protection, you hate the war and the world and the Amanto and the nation and above all you hate him for worming his way into your precious trio. You hate him so much because you know he's going to die miserable and alone and choking on blood and you can't do anything, you can't protect anything, you can't save anyone.

He agrees to stay (more fool him) and that's how this whole briar-patch snarl of a relationship begins: a question, an answer, a commitment, Tatsuma wheezing miserably through his broken nose and your knees buckling from exhaustion.

 

\---

 

You keep your promise and he keeps his. You sit next to each other at the table, around the campfire, during discussions. You become each other's buffers. You laugh at his jokes, he teams up with you in Uno. When things get too hard, when he starts to drown, you walk him in the forests or through the fields or up and down deserted streets, and you listen. You'll be his crutch. It feels good to support someone.

Sometimes during your nighttime walks Tatsuma looks at you with strange bright eyes and talks in circles. He'll get close to some kind of revelation and then laugh like he's made the best joke in the world. You are patient, and finally he unhinges his jaw and vomits forth great torrents of words. You become a sieve and filter his effluvia. His gruesome details belong to you, now. You'll keep them close. (They hold potential.)

There's some reciprocation, shared secrets, stories about childhood and leaving home and temple school and Shouyou. You describe your plans for rescue and revenge in exquisite, loving, delicious detail. It's nice to vocalize all the vicious thoughts that threaten to consume you. Zura wouldn't understand, Gintoki would understand too well. Tatsuma listens. Is he also a sieve? Does it matter? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if someone knew your darkest heart. (Frightening vulnerability, the kind you abhor.) 

You don't love him romantically, or the way a mother loves a child. You don't love him like he's your own self. You're not sure if you even like him but you have decided to protect him. Something needs to remain unbroken or everything will fall apart, because otherwise what's the point? Tatsuma is impossibly precious. He thinks he's become jaded, but he hasn't. His innocence is beautiful and delicate as thin-blown glass, and you relish it. You like beautiful things. They're so full of possibility. It's almost a nice feeling when glass shatters, because then you can put the shards together in a new and dangerous way and make something sadder, lovelier, sharper than before. You love him, and you love the shimmering object he can become.

 

**\---**

 

The two of you fight well together. He's a dragon, all thunder and roar; you're a serpent spreading silent venom. He bellows and hacks and cackles a path through crowds of Amanto, sweeps them out of the way, shrieking laughter under hot sprays of blood while you slip into the opening and deliver quiet devastation. He is a loud person. You are quiet. He distracts and slashes and shouts and grins while you slither beneath and slip your sword beneath armor, between ribs. A good match. A good team. A pair. A second self.

He's too sharp and skilled and unnaturally lucky to die in battle, and that's a rare blessing, because you realize that (oh misfortune!) you do love him. You love him so much. He is a bright mirror, a 'could have been,' a constant sorrow because he thinks he's jaded and maybe now he is, just a little. He's stronger and more despairing, though it'll take a catastrophe to destroy him. You remember the old griefs he spilled, small and large, but you're not sure he remembers them. There are so many new ones, more each day. He's started to sound hard and cold behind his laughter, selfish, spiteful. Perhaps you have been a bad influence. (That Shinsuke, always such a bad influence on the other children.) You have to protect him. You've failed Zura, you never had the chance to rescue Gintoki, and Tatsuma is your last chance to redeem yourself. Your family hated you. It's a wonder Shouyou ever tolerated you, little viper, little beast. You are a misery. You are a plague. You refuse to let your glass animal be smudged or shattered. It's already started to crack.

So you begin to fight on two fronts. The first is the visible fight, the obvious one, the old bloody dance with the Amanto. It's part pleasure, part chore, nice to kill but ever so difficult to get the bloodstains out of your clothing. The second fight is to save Tatsuma. At one point you wanted him broken and reformed, destroyed and remade for his own good, but now you are scared that it's happened while you weren't looking and you are afraid he has broken in the wrong places and you, Takasugi Shinsuke, are never afraid. (You're always afraid.)

 

\---

 

One night you ask him to take a walk and he declines.

It's the first time he's refused you.

Your traitorous heart breaks, as if you were spurned by a lover. You want to bury your entire wretched being in ash. Gintoki agrees to walk with you and you spend an angry half hour stalking the perimeter of the camp, scanning the horizon for some welcome disaster.

"It's rough, huh?" Gintoki says.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Gintoki sighs. He always sighs, and then rolls his eyes, then sticks a finger in his ear and picks away at the wax. Not even twenty and he's already an old man.

"It's rough watching him fall apart, isn't it." Gintoki pulls his finger out of his ear and examines it. "Ugh. Three days and it still feels weird. How do you know if your ear is infected?"

"Your balance gets all fucked up. You've never had an ear infection?"

"Don't think so." It's so infuriating. How can he not know if he's ever had an ear infection? You either know or you don't!

But then, Gintoki's never been one for solid ground, now has he?

You wish he was dead. You wish you were both dead. You wish he was Tatsuma. You wish you were both dead.

The rest of the walk is uneventful. You go back and sleep and wake up and eat, and you go out to murder with your Loud Person, your dragon, and you skip the evening meal. You can eat your own spite, instead. 

He brings you some food, later, and you wordlessly pick at it, and it tastes like dirt. "I dropped it on the ground on my way," he says sheepishly, and you start to laugh and inhale your own saliva and choke. He pounds you on the back while your breath whistles in and out, and you love the dizzy-bright-dark of oxygen deprivation because it means you're alive and fighting to stay that way. He's laughing and hitting you, awful, perfect.

Oh, Tatsuma. Please leave. Please run. You love him so much you never want to see him again.


End file.
